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Monthly Archives: May 2008
Following Blowjobs election as London mayor; the continued long-slow-slide of the Labour-party into prissy Daily Mail appeasing, authoritarian, technocracy and the rise of a reinvigorated Tory party it looks to me like the UK is heading ever rightwards. Indeed in some places it looks like some parts of the electorate are turning into outright nazis, what with places such as Stoke-On-Trent so disenfranchised from Nu-Lab’s technocratic, home-owning, ABC1 guff that they are voting BNP.
It seems to me that this is wholly systematic of a slow creeping fascism that is the result of convergence of several factors that have effected the UK since the second world war. Principal among these is the process that has seen citizens turned into consumers.
Thatcher’s use of monetarist theory in the eighties, as this episode from Adam Curtis’ series Pandora’s Box shows, destroyed the working class as a power bloc in UK politics.
What eventually came to fill the gap was shopping. But shopping is a greedy, self-interested pursuit, with the shopper always on the look-put for value for money. Thus out the window goes notions of society, and the good of all. Nu-Lab never were a party of the left, they were right-wing all along with a bit of pfi social conscience tacked on for good measure. In this sense they continued to appease the the selfish, psychotic side of UK society – the part that doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else as long as it’s OK.
The end result of this will of course end up being something like the culture wars of the USA. Now the Labour movement is dying on it’s feet the concerns of the UK’s underclass can seemingly only be expressed in voting for candidates that promulgate rightwing theories and Worldviews
Official histories always leave something out. They level out contradictions and fail to adequately reflect the tension between competing narratives. History promotes certain aspects of a given epoch while erasing others altogether. Such history, which is formulated at a distance, is inherently hegemonic, conscriptive and myopic. It asserts the primacy of what follows on from historical and cultural events rather than examining what led up to them. This is the history that leads to dangerous and corpulent narratives such as the notion of “the shining city on the Hill”, or “God’s chosen people”.
Despite what the history books might tell you, there are no unique singularities. Everything arises from a history of the contemporaneous. Each historical event is its own end point – certainly just as much as it is the jumping off point for what is to follow.
Which is all really a very long-winded way of saying that it is impossible to talk about Mid 80s NYC post-No-Wave group Live Skull, without mentioning Sonic Youth.
The factors underlying Sonic Youth’s elevation beyond the culture and context which spawned them is a conversation for another time, but they weren’t a unique singularity of the underground NYC art-rock scene. Nothing of the sort, for a host of other groups including Swans, UT, Band of Susan’s, Rat At Rat R and Live Skull were trawling the same waters. Still even back in 1985, with Sonic Youth’s star still to rise, Live Skull’s Mark C felt compelled to distance the two groups. In a interview with Greed Magazine he said:
“Sonic Youth is a lot of different things. It’s a hard-rock band, an art band, and they experiment with pop — there’s a lot of play in Sonic Youth. We don’t have that sense of play. We just go out and concentrate really hard on what we’re doing. Also, Sonic Youth uses all kinds of unusual tunings, and our tuning is just straight, regular tuning. It’s a completely different sound.”
The name Live Skull sums a lot of the bands aesthetic, these songs alternate between shriek and scream; grind and drone. The drums go all over the place while the guitars duel it out, over solid but dankly oppressive basslines. I can’t actually think of one musical cliché that Live Skull fall back upon – and all this using regular guitar tunings. The NY Times was supportive and even Trouser Press, a publication that always seems to miss the point, said of them:
“Droning and dragging rusty guitar streaks and deep stormy basslines as dark as bus exhaust, Live Skull combine great grating sheets of guitar shimmer with deliberately monotonous vocals to create swirling intense tunes that you couldn’t hum if a loaded gun were aimed at your head.”
Lyrically the band deals with the oppressive, the dark and the existential. Bodies fly through windscreens; nameless tormentors stalk helpless victims; people have bad trips; mental cruelty is the order of the day.
The first (and best as far as I’m concerned) period of Live Skulls career encompasses their self-titled EP, first full album Bringing Home The Bait, second album Cloud One and a live album, Don’t Get Any On You In actual fact it’s on Don’t Get Any On You, a live record that Live Skull reach their zenith. Next to this record Live Skull’s studio output seems almost tame and ethereal). On these records Live Skull maintain a perfect balance between duelling guitars, menace, boy/girl vocals, the Dionysian chaos of No Wave and the failed transcendentalism of hardcore.
Things became more downbeat when Thalia Zedek joined the band. Mark C said at the time that the group wanted to create a record that had “a more relaxed, laid-back feel”, and in these terms Dusted is a success. However what is sacrificed is some of the wanton chaos of the group’s earlier records
It could also be said that Zedek’s cigarette-ravaged tones unbalance the equilibrium of the tracks, with the music seemingly being simplified to accommodate her.
It’s no surprise that original bassist Marnie Greenholz left after the six-song Snuffer EP. I suspect that in someway she missed the vocal duties which she had partially fulfilled prior to Zedek joining the band. This seems to be borne out by a comment from Tom Paine after Zedek first joined the band: “Marnie misses it (singing), I think. She sang for different reasons than we did,”
Sondra Andersson (Gleen Branca’s cousin and former basis in Rat At Rat R, replaced Greenholz for the Final Live Skull album, Positraction. Compared to what proceeded it this is a positively optimistic, affirmative record, which once again isn’t too say it’s bad or even mediocre – it’s just that it doesn’t make your hair stand on end like the best Live Skull records.
After Positraction Live Skull disbanded and in the process seemed to become just a footnote in the stories of Sonic Youth and Thalia Zedek.
Sadly it seems like this was even the case when Live Skull were at the height of their powers. Said Mark C:
“Not enough people know that Live Skull exists. More people would like our music if they only knew about us — plenty of people are sick of what they’re listening to and would like something different.”
And of course this is the tension/contradiction that so many groups were faced with at the end of the 80s. Live Skull weren’t the only group trying to walk the tight-rope between accessibility and purity of aesthetic vision. You only have to read Michale Azzerad’s book on the eighties underground to realise that. Of course we all know what followed: Alternative Nation; the Year that Punk Broke and the whole-sale sell-off of the underground. Sadly it’s a pity that many of the groups that defined and brought so much to the aesthetic and culture, that went on to mainstream success in the 90s were erased from the picture.
Live Skull on MySpace
An abridged version this article appeared in #5 of Another Catastrophe Zine.
Well as previously remarked gormless, northern, clotheshorse Aggggggynes Deyn look’s like a rodents spayed genitals. However, has anyone noticed that Daisy Lowe (secret love child of Gavin Rossdale and Pearl Spam from defunct Britpop troupe Powder; and now gym-slip girlfriend of overly-priveleged DJ/wanker Mark Ronson) also resembles something from the animal kingdom?
That’s right! She’s the spit of a pekingese!
I found these clips from the Getting Close To Nothing video zine the other day. I have to say that the clip for Single Bullets is particularly poignant, recalling a world where you had to rely on yr wits a bit more and things weren’t so prescribed and self-aggrandising.
I seem to recall the sleeve notes of Huggy Bear’s final 7″, Main Squeeze saying: “the scum floats to the surface in days like these.”
How ironic then to find Kate Nash saying in an interview with HARP, that:
“I like Bikini Kill and Le Tigre, but my boyfriend says that Huggy Bear is the best out of all of them,” she says holding a copy of Huggy Bear’s 1995 album Weaponry Listens to Love. “They’re really hard to get a hold of because they’re out of print. Thirteen dollars… I’ve got to have it.”
Still it does illiustrate the point that the fact that a compilation of Huggy Bear material has never appeared since the band split is actually rather heroic. Certainly if the number of people buying Bikini Kill Records is anything to go buy the band could make a mint.
Single Bullets
February 14th
No Sleep Til
Her Jazz
The whole of the Getting Close to Nothing videos can be found on HalfSquirrels Youtube Channel.
P.S – This woman is a moron.
Pigeons woke me up at 5am this morning so I’m in a particularly energetic mood, so I’ll just copy and paste from a press release like the majority of ‘lifestyle’ journalists do:
“ Pink Skull’s mastermind Julian Grefe is the wild-eyed, psychedelic stalwart of Philadelphia’s indie dance music scene. An accomplished musician, producer, and DJ with a slew of bands, records, and music projects to his credit, Grefe was a turntable resident of the long-running Making Time and [click.] parties and has performed and DJ’ed for cool kids around the globe.”
Free mp3s can be found at Pink Skull’s website:
And on perenial freebie lovers site RCRD LBL.
p.s – In other Pink Skull news, they have a new record, Zeppelin 3, out today.
I’m not usually moved to big-up ‘free’ versions of big music software developers wares. Usually these things are pretty useless cut-down versions of their commercial cousins, however Native Instruments Kore Player is, for a freebie, amazing.
Kore Player doesn’t have any time-outs, save-disables or bursts of noise. What it does have is masses of free sounds, which all sound amazing. What’s more after playing around with the my free version last night I pretty much got to grip with how the thing worked in 15 minutes, which compared to a lot of music software is a VERY short space of time (for me anyway).
I guess the idea is that after using the player punters will be so blown-away that they end up investing in expansion packs, and I certainly caught my self looking at the price of expansion packs on NI’s website, but even if you don’t, what you get for free is pure quality.
I saw Health the other day and they were, I have to say, pretty amazing. Their album is one of the better things I’ve heard lately, but they were better than even that had suggested.
I’m not really a huge fan of remixes (and remix albums are generally nothing but cash-ins), however, the Health//Disco record looks like it could shape up to be pretty special.
NOSAJ Thing and Acid Girl Remixes are free to download from the Health//Disco Myspace page, while Crimewave can be downloaded on the original Health page.
Individuality must die
Listening to the corporate drones on the train talk endlessley about their work; watching the yuppies tap away on the keyboards of their Air Macs; reading about how great Agyness Deyn, Daisy Lowe and Lily Allen are in The London Paper; reading how immigration, tax and poor people are the root of all evil in the London Lite,. All these things underscore, for me the fact that, the World has transmogrified into one consumerist mall filled with wrong-headed people, unable to act rationally. It makes me want to revisit Adam Curtis’ brilliant four-part documentary, Century of the Self.